Choosing a program to write PHP code depends on your preferences, experience, and feature requirements. Here are a few popular editors and integrated development environments (IDEs) that programmers often use to work with PHP:
Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a lightweight but powerful editor with many plugins. It supports PHP through extensions that add syntax highlighting, autocomplete, debugging, and more.
PHPStorm is one of the most popular and feature-rich development environments specifically for PHP. It provides deep integration with various PHP frameworks, database management systems, frontend tools, and excellent debugging capabilities.
Sublime Text is a very fast and customizable text editor. While it's not a full-fledged IDE, the many plugins and customizations make it a good choice for PHP development.
NetBeans is a free IDE that supports many languages, including PHP. It provides comprehensive code handling features such as autocomplete, parsing, and visual debugger.
Eclipse for PHP Developers is another powerful and free IDE designed for PHP developers. It supports a large set of plugins to extend its functionality.
Atom is an editor from GitHub that can be customized for PHP development with plugins for syntax highlighting, autocomplete and other handy tools.
The choice depends on what features you need, your comfort level with a particular environment, and your personal preferences. For example, if you need strong framework support and in-depth code analysis, PHPStorm would be a great choice. If, however, you are looking for something lighter and faster, VS Code or Sublime Text might be good options.